The issuer of the largest stablecoin by capitalization, Tether, has authorized the issuance of 450 million new USDT tokens over the past two days. This happened against the background of the Bitcoin price reaching the $ 13,000 mark for the first time this year.
According to the Whale Alert service, Tether issued USD 150 million on October 20, and USD 300 million on October 22.
Both transactions added to the stablecoin market offer on the Tron blockchain. The first came before the news about PayPal adding the ability to buy and sell bitcoin.
Paolo Ardoino, CTO of the company, explained that the issuer decided to replenish USDT reserves in anticipation of additional demand.
“This is an authorized but not completed transaction. These assets will be used to support the next period of applications for issue ”,he wrote.
At the time of writing, the issuer has distributed 160 million USDT among exchanges Binance and Huobi, as well as several well-known addresses.
According to the Tether website, 282 million coins remain authorized but not issued on the Tron blockchain. About the same - on the Omni blockchain, on the Ethereum blockchain - 23.9 million coins.
The aggregate market supply of USDT is $ 16.22 billion, of which $ 10.33 billion is issued on the Ethereum blockchain.
The previous episode of active issuance of Tether occurred in July this year, when the price of Bitcoin stormed a 10-month high.
In April, researchers concluded that issuing Tether and other stablecoins is not pushing cryptocurrencies upward.
Over the past three years, the share of trades denominated in USDT has increased from 5% to 70%.
